BUDDHISM

Buddhism

Buddhism

Buddhism

Buddhism is a religion and philosophy founded in India c.525 back, by Siddhartha Gateman, called the Buddha. There are over 300 million Buddhists worldwide. One of the great world religions, it is divided into two main schools: the Theravada or Hiragana in Sri Lanka and SE Asia, and the Mahayana in China, Mongolia, Korea, and Japan. (Cone, 2009, 110) A third school, the Varian, has a long tradition in Tibet and Japan. Buddhism has largely disappeared from its country of origin, India, except for the presence there of many refugees from the Tibet region of China and a small number of converts from the lower castes of Hinduism.

The life of a Buddhist monk involved a strenuous mental discipline. Meditation practice was an elaborate science, serious commitment to which entailed a routine that (at least in the early stages) disrupted the normal pattern of sleeping and waking, producing dreamlike states. (Baumann, 2007, 64)Monks devoted themselves to practices producing altered states of consciousness; they favored isolation, ate and drank only minimally, and went without creature comforts. It is difficult at first to see why a religious movement like this should gain substantial popular support anywhere.

The main advances in material culture became widespread later. By about the fourth century, money became a normal medium of exchange; commerce was expanding and caravans of merchants were risking the perils of the great wilderness areas in pursuit of profits from long-distance trade. By the time of Atoka, India''s first great emperor and proponent of Buddhism, in the late third century BC, writing had been introduced, baked bricks were widely used in construction, and iron tools had come into general use. Buddhism seems by then to have been particularly associated with commerce; in the later period vouched for by inscriptions, monasteries were often close to trading centers, and merchants figured prominently among lay supporters. (Baumann, 2007, 64)

There are indications within the scriptures that, almost from the outset, Buddhism began to involve itself more and more with the life of surrounding society. (Cone, 2009, 110) At first, monks were supposed to linger in one place only during the rainy season, but gradually the wandering decreased, so that eventually the retreats evolved into permanent monasteries, and the monks within them entered into a symbiotic relationship with the local lay supporters who supplied them with food and other goods. A large part of the scriptures, the Vineyard, sets out the rules that monks were to follow in their monastic life, and includes many details about relations with the laity.

Doctrine Of Buddhism

The basic doctrines of early Buddhism, which remain common to all Buddhism, include the "four noble truths": existence is suffering (dacha); suffering has a cause, namely craving and attachment (trishaw); there is a cessation of suffering, which is nirvana; and there is a path to the cessation of suffering, the "eightfold path" (Cone, 2009, 110) of right views, right resolve, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, and right ...